i read about users who wanted to sell their tosa, others bought a 2nd zaurus and again others flash frequently from rom to rom. some time ago i also had the idea to change the zaurus model. there must be reasons for that and i think its not the hardware aspect of this device.

the aim of this thread should be to share your thoughts and experiences on the different roms. it can also be useful for others who want to test a different rom. what do you like, what do you hate? what works, what doesnt?

i will start with my opinion on the different roms. some of them i used for several months, some only for several hours. but maybe others will write more on the roms, i only tested.

before i start, i should mention for what i use my zaurus most of the time: reading news with opiereader, pim (kopi), latex, wikipedia with zbedic, from time to time mp3s and ebooks...

----------------SHARPROM ----------------

for the moment it seems to be the best choice for me. i used it for the most of the time, but nevertheless my report is short.

i used (maybe i should write tested) it for nearly 3 months with ups and downs. in the end i had the feeling that i dont use this rom on a daily basis, i was spending a lot of time in getting things to work. i had problems with suspend/resume and in some cases only taking off the battery helped.

this was more than 6 months ago. now i tried 1.1 beta out and i was suprised but in the negative. it took me 10 minutes to flash back as everything i tried out went wrong: i started scite and dillo, minimized it, then i recognized that the time was wrong. setting the time resulted in turning off the backlight and killing the minimized applications?! i added a rotation applet on the taskbar. but i was not able to rotate back. suspending confuses me as the backlight is turned off for more than one second and then the device does that what it should do.

all this sounds bad, but it is nothing serious. i know that a lot of tosa users use this rom, so it has to be good. and be sure that i will give it another try, maybe using a different wm than matchbox.

pros: great, active community and communication. very nice rom with all the advantages of X application. the idea of running the same wm on my linux box (kde) and my zaurus is somehow cool. cons: see above. maybe the speed of the tosa (and the rom) is not sufficient enough to run big applications like kde.

-------------------OPENZAURUS-------------------

oz was the reason getting me a linux pda instead of a pocket pc. i owned a collie running hentges rom and everything was fine, ii was also running sharp applications under opie with compat libs.

pros: very structured development with higher aims (i dont know if this is a really pro in view of the users). upcoming kernel 2.6, but unfortunately the tosa device does not play a main role for natural reasons. ability to run a lot of applications, those of the sharprom world with opie and compat libs and also X applications with gpe. the dual boot idea is also very good.

cons: there are some bugs in oz 3.5.4 rc1, which hold me back on jumping on this train, in the first place the line drawing bug, sound problems with opie, missing keys. the bad thing in my opinion is that all the mentioned bugs are not new and are well known from previous releases. i dislike the feed structure of oz. net, network, networking, this confuses me, a directory named e and a lot of ones with only one package, hundreds of "locales". maybe it doesnt matter for those who use ipkg from the console, but if you want to use the package manager it matters..

--------------------GUYLHEMROM--------------------

a kind of "one man show". i tried it in the beginning and had the feeling that this rom was more or less a personal nand backup, a kind of snapshot. i also tried the fast kernel thing getting me crazy as the "f" key turned the light on and off. natural consequence: i avoided this rom for months. now i tried rc4 and i was suprised. i like the boot screen (no confusing warnings as before). a lot of things changed.

pros: the exact battery applet, nice fonts. the idea of getting the existing rom more usable. guylhem used nicer fonts, why not use nicer icons?

cons: i removed a lot of applications and installed some others, but i was not able to remove the corresponding icons or to move them between the categories with the help of the launcher. restarting opie and rebooting didnt changed anything except the touchscreen was not responding (maybe i removed the wrong applications).